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| Cast members allegedly drop bomb at DragonCon that final 10 episodes of Sci-Fi's hit will begin airing in February 2009. Most fans of Battlestar Galactica were saddened to hear that the upcoming fourth season would be the show's last. BSG actor Edward James Olmos, who plays the stern Bill Adama, first let details of a final season slip in an interview at the sci-fi-centric Saturn Awards this past May. The statement was later confirmed by the drama's creators, Ronald Moore and David Eick, who said the program was "always meant to have a beginning, middle, and finally, an end." Conventional wisdom says that 2008 should be the final year of Battlestar, with the fourth season kicking off with the two-hour Razor telefilm this November and the season concluding sometime in 2008. If reports out of Atlanta's DragonCon are to be believed, Battlestar's final season could be agonizingly stretched out for longer than thought. Over the weekend, Ain't it Cool News was tipped off by a reader who claims to have attended the Battlestar Galactica panel at the sci-fi convention, where cast members said that the current plan is to split the final season in two 10-episode halves. The first 10 episodes are scheduled to air in February 2008, and, according to the cast on the panel, the second 10 will air in...*gulp*...February 2009. The reader also claims that the cast, which included Aaron Douglas and Jamie Bamber, took some shots at Sci-Fi Channel's handling of the situation, with Bamber saying "that the channel is not used to producing high-quality material, and now that it has a hit, it doesn't know what to do with it." SyFy Portal did some digging on the matter and was able to find out that Sci-Fi is indeed splitting the fourth season, but has not decided how long the break between halves will be. Given the beating from fans (and lost ratings) that serialized dramas have taken from mid-season breaks, resting Battlestar Galactica for an extended period would seem like a poor move on Sci-Fi's part. Take this rumor of a 2009 finale with a grain of salt. [UPDATE--September 6] Reps from NBC Universal, Sci-Fi's parent company, could not confirm the cast member's statements and could only confirm that the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica would premiere in 2008. |